AI War 2 v0.808 Released! “Custom Stacks”

Bunches of improvements for various factions, and also for the “unit stacks” feature. There’s still more I plan to do with that feature in general (such as making AOE and beam weapons actually have a bonus against stacks, for one example), but for now this lets you choose custom stack sizes and how things stack, etc. If you’re on a stronger machine, the need for stacks is pretty diminished.

A number of requested balance changes have also been brought to you by Puffin. In general this is yet another release brought to you by Badger, Quinn, and Puffin. I’m extremely grateful to them for continuing to hold down the fort.

Frustratingly, I’m still easing back into things with various end of year finances and other business bits. I also have been having a metric ton of things I’ve been having to learn about rapidly outside of work, legally and financially and… otherwise, so it’s just been a period of a lot of information onboarding for me. I keep thinking I’m right about ready to get back to proper coding and design work, but it’s been a bit of a longer stretch than I ever imagined it would be. I think I’m almost through with that, but I keep saying that and then there’s more to learn and do. I should be able to explain to folks what happened in my personal life by late January, but right now there’s still just a lot happening with that that is private, as well as kind of rapidly changing states of things. There have been some particularly positive developments in the last week in particular, so I’m hopeful that those will have a bit of an effect that bleeds over into me being able to properly do my effing job again.

As I noted last time, rest assured that this won’t be a permanent state of affairs, and I’m not going anywhere. This is hopefully a once-per-lifetime event, and despite the continual additional unexpected hurdles and hoops I’ve run into, things have been getting better. Particularly in the last week. But Rome wasn’t rebuilt in a day after any of the times it burned down, so I’m taking things as quickly as I reasonably can. I really am getting there! Thanks again to everyone for their support and kind words.

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you’ll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it’s a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you’ll be notified about any game releases we do.

Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn’t have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that’s how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support.

About Arcen (Ar-ken) Games

Originally known for our unusual and highly effective approach to RTS artificial intelligence in our debut title AI War: Fleet Command, we have since branched out into many other genres and styles of games.

As you can tell by browsing our catalog of titles, our interests are eclectic, and we have a particular affinity for blurring the lines between unlikely genres.